It s not you -- its the test (or if you dont understand it, it probably doesnt make sense)

Much as Ive tried to cut back on  tutoring to work on my seemingly endless SAT book revisions, I somehow havent been able to escape entirely. In fact, I somehow ended up with no fewer than five (!) students taking the ACT this Saturday. Its therefore entirely unsurprising that Ive had  the same set of conversations repeatedly over the last couple of weeks. (Its also entirely unsurprising that I can no longer remember which conversation Ive had with whom and am therefore reduced to constantly asking the student in front of me whether weve  already discussed a particular rule, or whether I actually gave the explanation  to someone. Although actually Ive been doing  that for a while now.) Perhaps not unexpectedly at this point in the year, almost all of my students were second rounders people who had worked with other tutors, for months in some cases, before finding their way to me. And that meant that there was the inevitable psychological baggage that accumulates when someone has already taken the test a couple of times without reaching their goals. As a result, Ive been paying just as much attention to  how people work through the test. When I work with a student  who actually does have most of the skills they need but cant quite seem to apply them when it counts, thats basically a given. Its interesting Ive never really bought into a lot of the whole test anxiety thing, but more and more, I find myself dealing with the psychological aspects of test taking. (But rest assured, I dont talk about scented candles or relaxation  exercises). Anyway, over the last few weeks, Ive  found myself paying an awful lot of attention to  just what  people who are scoring in the mid-20s on ACT English and trying to get to 30+ do when they sit down with a test.  Im pretty good at managing  the psychological games that people play with themselves, particularly when they involve second-guessing, but Ive never spent so much time thinking about those  games specifically in terms of ACT English before. Well, theres a first time for everything. If theres one salient feature  that characterizes the ACT English test, its probably the straightforward, almost folksy Midwestern style. Theres an occasional question that really makes you think, but for the most part, what you see is what you get. A lot of wrong  answers are  really  wrong, almost to the point of absurdity. As I worked with my ACT students, I noticed something interesting: when the original version of a sentence (that is, the version in the passage) didnt make sense, the student would get confused and reread the sentence or section of the passage again. And when they still didnt understand, theyd reread it again. And sometimes a third time. The issue wasnt so much that they were  running out of time, but rather that they were wasting huge amounts of energy trying to make sense of things that  couldnt be made sense out of because they thought they were missing something. Then they were getting confused  and panicking and second-guessing themselves. So although it might sound obvious, I think this bears saying: if you are working through an ACT English section  and find that  you just cannot make sense out of a  phrase or sentence in the passage, that  version of the  phrase or sentence is wrong. Do  not try to  wrap your head around it by reading it again and again. You cant make sense out of it  because it doesnt make sense. In other words, its not you its the test. Even if you dont know what the right answer is, you do know what the answer is not: NO CHANGE. Pick up your pencil, put a line through A or F, and start plugging in the other options. You might not know quite what youre looking for, but at least  that way youre doing something constructive, not just freaking yourself out.